Footnotes and endnotes

Notes are the part of a book where the reader splits into two populations. Most readers never open one; those who do, read them the way other people read the book. Everything about note formatting follows from serving the second group without taxing the first.

The difference is position, not content

A footnote prints at the foot of the page where its marker appears. An endnote prints at the end of the chapter or the end of the book. The text is the same; the distance between the reference and the note is the whole decision.

The distance has a cost both ways. A footnote is instant — the eye drops a line and returns — but it spends page space on every page, and a heavily notated book can lose a fifth of its text block to the foot. An endnote keeps the page clean but makes the reader travel: thumb to the back, find the number, read, return. Trade publishing decided decades ago that most readers prefer the clean page; scholarly publishing disagreed and kept the foot. Both are right for their readers.

Who uses which

Book	Usual form
Fiction	None, or a few endnotes at the back
Trade nonfiction — history, biography, narrative	Endnotes, usually at the back
Popular science, business	Endnotes, or author notes in prose
Academic humanities	Footnotes, or author–date citations
Technical documentation	Footnotes, sparingly
Scholarly editions	Footnotes

Fiction deserves a word. Notes in a novel are a special effect, and they wear out fast: a handful at the back for a translator’s aside or a joke is a texture; more than that breaks the fictional surface the book spent three hundred pages building. If the notes are doing real explanatory work, the prose should probably absorb them.

The marker

The reference in the text is a superscript numeral, placed after the punctuation that belongs to the clause being annotated — after the full stop, the comma, or the closing quotation mark, and before an em dash. This placement is uniform across styles, and the commonest amateur error is the number pushed out before the sentence ends, where it reads as an exponent on the wrong clause.

Numbering has two conventions:

• Continuous through the book — note 143 is the 143rd note. Trade default; the back-matter list is one sequence and the reader’s search is trivial.
• Restarting per chapter — chapter nine begins again at note 1. Academic default, paired with notes organised by chapter; the chapter’s own numbering is self-contained.

Either is fine. The error is switching between them, which produces a back matter no reader can navigate.

Asterisks survive for the special cases: a single note on a page, or the note attached to the dedication. They are a display-page convention, not an alternative numbering scheme.

Where endnotes go, and who finds them

Endnotes at the end of the book are the trade norm — one apparatus, one sequence, the reader always knows where the back of the book ends. Notes per chapter suit academic work and anything whose chapters are read independently.

Wherever they sit, two pieces of furniture matter:

• The notes section is listed in the table of contents. A reader who wants the notes is exactly the reader who uses the contents; an apparatus that is not listed is an apparatus that is hidden.
• The notes’ own pages carry the book’s page numbers and running heads like any other back matter. An endnote that prints the page of its reference is the convention that saves the flip-back: note 143 saying “page 212” tells the reading reader what the note annotates without navigation.

Notes in an ebook

An ebook cannot put a note at the foot of a page, because the book has no pages — the reader’s type size decides where everything falls. What it does instead is link: the marker becomes a link to the note, and the reading system decides the presentation.

That presentation varies more than any other ebook element. Some systems show the note as a pop-up over the text; some jump to the back matter and expect the reader to return; some ignore the presentation entirely. The EPUB 3 standard provides the structural pieces — the note reference, the note body, the back link — and whether the pop-up materialises is the device’s choice.

What you control is the structure, and the structure is the whole game: a note that is attached to its reference can become a pop-up; a note that is a paragraph of small text at the foot of whatever the screen happens to hold cannot. This is the ebook failure of hand-made notes — in preparing a Word manuscript, the footnotes typed at the foot of the page lose their attachment, and no conversion can restore what was never recorded.

The notes themselves

A note is set smaller than the text, and the first line is indented with the note number — the conventions here are stable across styles. What varies by discipline is the citation form, and that is a rabbit hole with a map: pick one style — Chicago is the publishing default — and apply it mechanically. The reader who checks citations cares that they are consistent far more than which system they follow.

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Notes are the clearest case in the book of a formatting problem that is really a structure problem: where the note lives in the document decides everything about how it prints, links and behaves.

Nueel keeps note references attached to their sentences and notes as first-class blocks, so the print edition places them at the page foot or gathers them at the back per the design, and the EPUB gets real linked noterefs — one structure, both behaviours.

Common questions

Should I use footnotes or endnotes?

For a trade book, endnotes: they keep the page clean for readers who never consult them, and the handful who do will find them. Footnotes suit work whose notes are read alongside the text — academic books, technical documentation, and scholarly editions. The choice is about who reads the notes, not about which looks more serious.

Does the note number go before or after the punctuation?

After. The marker follows the full stop, the comma or the closing quotation mark that belongs to the clause it annotates. The exception is a dash: the marker goes before an em dash, because the dash carries the sentence forward and the note belongs to what came before it.

How do footnotes work in an ebook?

As links. A real note reference in an EPUB is a link from the marker to the note text, and reading systems render it in different ways — some as a pop-up over the page, some as a jump to the back. What matters is that the note is structurally attached to its reference, which is also what makes the pop-up possible.

Do endnote numbers restart each chapter?

Both conventions exist, and the split follows the note's audience. Academic books restart per chapter, which matches notes organised per chapter at the back. Trade books usually number continuously, because a reader flipping to the back is looking for note 143, not note 3 of chapter nine.